Senator Obama Compares Virginia Tech Shootings to Don Imus and the Export of Jobs Abroad

On Monday, April 16, the day of the Virginia Tech murders, Senator Barack Obama, delivered an address at a rally in Milwaukee. Here is a long excerpt from his comments regarding the taking of 32 innocent lives at Virginia Tech:

"There's also another kind of violence though that we're gonna have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence but that the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week, the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughter. I spend, along with my wife, a lot of time making sure that my two young daughters, who are gorgeous and tall and I hope will get basketball scholarships, that they feel good about who they are and that they understand they can do whatever they can dream might be possible. And for them to be degraded, or to see someone who looks like them degraded, that's a form of violence - it may be quiet, it may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn, but it is violence nonethesame.
We [inaudible].... There's the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under 'em because their job has moved to another country. They've lost their job, they've lost their pension benefits, and they've lost their health care and they're having to compete against their teenage children for jobs at the local fast food place paying $7 an hour.
There is the violence of children, whose voices are not heard, in communities that are ignored. Who don't have access to a decent education, who are surrounded by drugs and crime and a lack of hope.
So there's a lot of different forms of violence in our society and so much of it is rooted in our incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other - to not understand that we are all connected that we are all connected, fundamentally, as a people -- that as I said at the convention in 2004 that 'I am my brother's keeper' and 'I am my sister's keeper.' And that those who may not look like me, or talk like me, or worship the same god that I do, are nevertheless worthy of respect and dignity and a sense of common humanity."

This address displayed a severe lack of judgment and good sense. However repugnant were Don Imus' remarks, to compare his racist insult to the senseless murder of 32 people, on the very day of their deaths, at a time when the bodies had in all likelihood not even been moved, is nearly obscene. All the more so if the comparison is between murder and the exporting of jobs. Senator Obama has shown that he is trapped by the classic flaw in modern American left-wing thought, the inability to make rational distinctions, between good and evil, or, as in this case, between lesser and greater degrees of evil.

The entire speech may be read at Real Clear Politics. Richard Baehr, Chief Political Correspondent for The American Thinker, concurs that this speech proves Senator Obama is "not ready for prime time."